word?
The Official Cavs vs. Magic thread
- Thread starter Desert Eagle
- Start date
word?
Hes not playing in the Finals... no coach would bring a guy who hasnt played in months to play in the Finals... he'll be rusty as shit, timing wont be there and his stamina will be non existent.
ETHER
After cruising to 66 wins and sweeping the Pistons and the Hawks, most fans and media pundits had already conceded the championship to the Cavs. No question about it—LeBron James was the greatest thing to hit Cleveland since Otto Graham, the Cavs were virtually unbeatable at home, and as sure as death and taxes they were destined to succeed the Celtics.
But, after being humbled by the Magic, the Cavs are now on vacation.
Amid the ruins of Cleveland's latest disappointing professional franchise, there is one question that must be answered in retrospect: Why did the Cavs lose?
Here are the answers:
# There was a not-so-hidden warning in their league-leading record. Included in their 66 wins were just three against the Lakers, the Celtics, and the Magic (compared to six losses). A dismal sign that they weren't quite as good as their numbers indicated.
# Clearly, the Cavs believed all of the hype that surrounded them throughout the regular season. As a result, they became unbearably arrogant — as demonstrated by their unseemly bench celebrations over dunks, shot blocks, and blowouts. While the media praised these antics as proof of the team's "togetherness," the players were actually showing their disdain for their opponents and proving that they didn't really understand what a difficult and serious task laid ahead of them.
LeBron's swaggering and continual self-promotion was the most egregious of these haughty antics. It's only fitting that the prestidigitations of the Magic made LeBron disappear in the same cloud of chalk dust that he ostentatiously employed to announce his imperial presence before each game.
# Throughout the season, the media Muppets were also claiming that, at long last, LeBron was surrounded by worthy teammates. In truth, Orlando exposed Mo Williams as being defenseless, shot-happy, and short-armed whenever a game was up for grabs. He's always been a shooting guard in a point guard's body. And he wasn't the only issue.
Zydrunas Ilgauskas couldn't guard his own lunch, was no longer a consistent threat in the low post, and had devolved into being a modern-day equivalent of Mel Counts. Anderson Varejao was both foul- and flop-prone, and consistently tried to do things that he was incapable of doing — like hitting jump shots. Ben Wallace was old and in the way. Wally Szczerbiak was a jump-shooting statue. Daniel Gibson and Sasha Pavlovic were 3-point specialists who could little else.
Only Delonte West had the toughness, the offensive versatility, and the defensive chops to enhance LBJ's game.
# And what about LeBron Himself?
His jumper is still incredibly erratic, especially when he pulls up going left and has to move the ball across his body to load his shot. This movement creates an often-costly lack of balance in his legs and leads to more bad misses than makes.
He still has difficulty stopping-and-popping with accuracy off a hard dribble.
He's a much better finisher when he approaches the hoop with his right hand — perhaps one of the best ever. And he's particularly deadly when he can execute one of his quick/tight/powerful spins as he attacks the basket. Push him left and load up the defensive help so that he can't spin and LeBron becomes a good, but not a great, finisher.
Too often he tries to force his dribble through an impenetrable crowd.
Too often he still massages the ball before he finally makes a move.
His chase-down blocks have given onlookers the impression that he's become an outstanding defender. Actually, his defense has indeed showed a significant improvement — in Game 6, the one time that he was caught in a switch on to Dwight Howard, LBJ forced the bigger man to take (and miss) a fadeaway hook shot. Still, jet-set opponents can still leave LeBron in the dust, and against all-comers he often wanders too far away from his man in pursuit of steals and blocks.
Finally, his incredible lack of grace after the loss signifies an ego of such humongous proportions as to enable him to deny any personal responsibility for the Cavs ultimate failure.
# Mike Brown must also accept his share of the blame.
His offense was much too predictable. Either the ball wound up in LeBron's hands in an isolation situation — after a screen/roll, a series of overly simplistic handoffs, or even just presenting a stationary target — or else he'd be dawdling his thumbs somewhere on the weak side while someone else took a turn.
The Cavs would have been better off with some kind of continuity offense — the triangle? — wherein LeBron would go one-on-one only if the shot clock was ticking down and nothing else developed.
Imagine being one of LeBron's teammates, standing around while he does his thing, waiting for the golden pass to come to you — or not — and then absolutely having to hit the open 3-pointer. Imagine the enormous pressure to make that shot. Imagine being either yanked to the bench or being ignored if you miss two or three such shots in a row.
Quite simply, if the defense knows precisely where the ball is eventually going to be positioned, it can make appropriate adjustments. Against the NBA's elite teams — and especially in a long series — these defensive adjustments became more sophisticated and more effective.
At the other end, the Cavs lacked a legitimate shot-blocker capable of erasing their defensive missteps. Ilguaskas was too immobile and Anderson too undisciplined.
What do the Cavs need, then, to take the next step?
# More beef in the frontcourt.
# A better defensive big man.
# Investigate the possibility of trading Ilgauskas.
# A true pass-first point guard.
# Employing Williams in his natural role — a scorer off the bench.
# Submitting to a team-wide workshop on the joys of humility.
# LeBron abdicating his papier-mache throne and becoming an unpretentious pilgrim like the rest of us.
Finally, LeBron has to make up his mind whether or not he'll commit the rest of his career to the Cavs. If so, then the quest will continue. If not, then now's the time for the Cavs to trade LBJ for as many young, talented players as the market will yield.
In any event, something's got to change in Cavs-land. More of the same will only result in more of the same.
Since we are talking about Cleveland.
http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/2009/writers/joe_posnanski/05/20/cleveland.rocks/index.html
Long-suffering Cleveland fans dare to imagine first title in 45 years
This story appears in the May 25, 2009, issue of Sports Illustrated.
What are two things you will never see in Cleveland?
A victory parade and the sky.
Halftime at the Q, and Frisbee Dog has dropped two Frisbees in a row, now three, four, yes, five in a row. Tension builds. Blood rushes to the face of Frisbee-throwing Guy, and he looks for a surefire connection, something to build his partner's confidence, but even the old dog-climbs-up-and-takes-Frisbee-out-of-hands trick ends in shame. The Frisbee rattles in the dog's teeth and flutters away. Six misses in a row.
It isn't the show I'm interested in. It is Cleveland. It is us. We are nervous. For 24 blissful minutes, we had been sitting in Quicken Loans Arena watching perfection. We watched the Cavaliers dominate the Hawks in a playoff game, watched LeBron James rise to the stratosphere and take us with him. And now we're back in Cleveland, back in a building named after an online lending company, and we're watching Frisbee Dog, who can't catch Frisbees.
"This is so Cleveland," Zev says. Zev is Zev Weiss, the tallest kid in my elementary school class year after year, now the CEO of American Greetings, one of about 20 Fortune 1000 companies still in Cleveland. I have not seen Zev in almost 30 years, but as we watch the hapless trials of Frisbee Dog, time melts away, and we are back in seventh grade feeling the same old anxieties: Please catch a damned Frisbee. Please don't turn this whole night into a joke.
So Cleveland. My hometown. Again and again, I try to explain Cleveland to people. It isn't easy. They say, "Oh, yeah, Rust Belt city, lots of snow, factories, it's just like Pittsburgh." But it isn't. In January, I went to the AFC Championship Game in Pittsburgh, and the halftime act was the Kittanning Firemen's Band, whose members all wore clothes that didn't match one another's, and everyone loved it. That is Pittsburgh.
Cleveland's different. Here it is, halftime of a playoff game, and the Cavs have the best and coolest basketball player in the world (sorry, Kobe), they have this lovable and workmanlike team that grinds on defense and tears away rebounds and gobbles up loose balls. The Cavaliers really (don't say it), truly (knock on wood) have a chance (stop before someone gets hurt) to bring Cleveland its first major sports championship in 45 years*...* and we are worried because there is a dog on the court dropping Frisbees.
"Hey, he caught one," Zev says. And sure enough, he did. Then Frisbee Dog catches a second, much to the appreciative and relieved cheers of the crowd. Then, not wanting to push things, Frisbee-throwing Guy makes his exit, bloodied but unbowed, embarrassed but not entirely disgraced, ready to throw Frisbees another day in a supermarket parking lot. A couple of minutes later King James is back on the floor, ready once again to lift us higher.
"Please," Zev says to me, "please, please do not put Cleveland on the cover of Sports Illustrated."
This is the archetypal Cleveland joke. It doesn't have to be Leavenworth, of course -- that's what makes it archetypal. It can be the Titanic, Siberia, a junkyard, Attica, the Hindenburg and, tellingly, hell. That version of the joke begins, "This Cleveland guy ends up in hell..." The laughter begins immediately, before you even get to what the difference is.
The jokes come back to me every time I do what I'm doing now -- driving through my hometown, around construction on Mayfield, through the staid old neighborhoods in Shaker Heights, over bumpy pavement in Mentor and South Euclid and Brook Park, Cleveland Heights and Brooklyn and Chardon, past the Thistledown Horse Track, in and out of Parma and Solon and Garfield Heights.
No city in America has had to endure more jokes than Cleveland. Detroit? Please. Milwaukee? Not even close. Ballplayers used to say that if they had to be in a plane crash, they hoped it was on the way into Cleveland. Rich Little said that they should rename Poland "Cleveland," because then the Russians wouldn't invade -- nobody wants to go to Cleveland. When President Bush held a town-hall meeting in Cleveland just last year, Conan O'Brien talked about two key objectives for the President: one, getting out of Iraq; and two, getting out of Cleveland.
Yes. Cleveland jokes. I have collected them for decades, ever since I was a nine-year-old sitting on my favorite train ride at my favorite Ohio amusement park, Cedar Point, in Sandusky, about 60 miles west of Cleveland. The train rumbled through Boneville, an old Western-looking place with skeletons doing surprisingly mundane tasks like cooking hot dogs over an open fire and buying tickets at the train depot. Suddenly our train was attacked by a band of Indians. Gunfire sounded. Arrows flew. Danger.
"Don't worry, folks," the conductor said, "those are Cleveland Indians. And everyone knows that the Cleveland Indians can't hit anything."
By then Cleveland was America's punch line. That was not long after the Cuyahoga River caught fire, not long after Mayor Ralph Perk's hair also caught fire at some ribbon-cutting ceremony. This was when Lake Erie was so polluted that people talked about walking across it to Canada, when Mayor Dennis Kucinich had to wear a wee bulletproof vest to throw out the first pitch at an Indians game because of death threats, when Cleveland became the first city since the Depression to default on loans. The efforts to save Cleveland then were earnest and touchingly misguided. I remember when the city's image makers decided on a new slogan: "New York's the Big Apple, but Cleveland's a plum." Tourism, as far as I know, did not skyrocket. Most people referred to Cleveland as they always had: the Mistake by the Lake.
http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/2009/writers/joe_posnanski/05/20/cleveland.rocks/index.html
Long-suffering Cleveland fans dare to imagine first title in 45 years
This story appears in the May 25, 2009, issue of Sports Illustrated.
What are two things you will never see in Cleveland?
A victory parade and the sky.
Halftime at the Q, and Frisbee Dog has dropped two Frisbees in a row, now three, four, yes, five in a row. Tension builds. Blood rushes to the face of Frisbee-throwing Guy, and he looks for a surefire connection, something to build his partner's confidence, but even the old dog-climbs-up-and-takes-Frisbee-out-of-hands trick ends in shame. The Frisbee rattles in the dog's teeth and flutters away. Six misses in a row.
It isn't the show I'm interested in. It is Cleveland. It is us. We are nervous. For 24 blissful minutes, we had been sitting in Quicken Loans Arena watching perfection. We watched the Cavaliers dominate the Hawks in a playoff game, watched LeBron James rise to the stratosphere and take us with him. And now we're back in Cleveland, back in a building named after an online lending company, and we're watching Frisbee Dog, who can't catch Frisbees.
"This is so Cleveland," Zev says. Zev is Zev Weiss, the tallest kid in my elementary school class year after year, now the CEO of American Greetings, one of about 20 Fortune 1000 companies still in Cleveland. I have not seen Zev in almost 30 years, but as we watch the hapless trials of Frisbee Dog, time melts away, and we are back in seventh grade feeling the same old anxieties: Please catch a damned Frisbee. Please don't turn this whole night into a joke.
So Cleveland. My hometown. Again and again, I try to explain Cleveland to people. It isn't easy. They say, "Oh, yeah, Rust Belt city, lots of snow, factories, it's just like Pittsburgh." But it isn't. In January, I went to the AFC Championship Game in Pittsburgh, and the halftime act was the Kittanning Firemen's Band, whose members all wore clothes that didn't match one another's, and everyone loved it. That is Pittsburgh.
Cleveland's different. Here it is, halftime of a playoff game, and the Cavs have the best and coolest basketball player in the world (sorry, Kobe), they have this lovable and workmanlike team that grinds on defense and tears away rebounds and gobbles up loose balls. The Cavaliers really (don't say it), truly (knock on wood) have a chance (stop before someone gets hurt) to bring Cleveland its first major sports championship in 45 years*...* and we are worried because there is a dog on the court dropping Frisbees.
"Hey, he caught one," Zev says. And sure enough, he did. Then Frisbee Dog catches a second, much to the appreciative and relieved cheers of the crowd. Then, not wanting to push things, Frisbee-throwing Guy makes his exit, bloodied but unbowed, embarrassed but not entirely disgraced, ready to throw Frisbees another day in a supermarket parking lot. A couple of minutes later King James is back on the floor, ready once again to lift us higher.
"Please," Zev says to me, "please, please do not put Cleveland on the cover of Sports Illustrated."
This is the archetypal Cleveland joke. It doesn't have to be Leavenworth, of course -- that's what makes it archetypal. It can be the Titanic, Siberia, a junkyard, Attica, the Hindenburg and, tellingly, hell. That version of the joke begins, "This Cleveland guy ends up in hell..." The laughter begins immediately, before you even get to what the difference is.
The jokes come back to me every time I do what I'm doing now -- driving through my hometown, around construction on Mayfield, through the staid old neighborhoods in Shaker Heights, over bumpy pavement in Mentor and South Euclid and Brook Park, Cleveland Heights and Brooklyn and Chardon, past the Thistledown Horse Track, in and out of Parma and Solon and Garfield Heights.
No city in America has had to endure more jokes than Cleveland. Detroit? Please. Milwaukee? Not even close. Ballplayers used to say that if they had to be in a plane crash, they hoped it was on the way into Cleveland. Rich Little said that they should rename Poland "Cleveland," because then the Russians wouldn't invade -- nobody wants to go to Cleveland. When President Bush held a town-hall meeting in Cleveland just last year, Conan O'Brien talked about two key objectives for the President: one, getting out of Iraq; and two, getting out of Cleveland.
Yes. Cleveland jokes. I have collected them for decades, ever since I was a nine-year-old sitting on my favorite train ride at my favorite Ohio amusement park, Cedar Point, in Sandusky, about 60 miles west of Cleveland. The train rumbled through Boneville, an old Western-looking place with skeletons doing surprisingly mundane tasks like cooking hot dogs over an open fire and buying tickets at the train depot. Suddenly our train was attacked by a band of Indians. Gunfire sounded. Arrows flew. Danger.
"Don't worry, folks," the conductor said, "those are Cleveland Indians. And everyone knows that the Cleveland Indians can't hit anything."
By then Cleveland was America's punch line. That was not long after the Cuyahoga River caught fire, not long after Mayor Ralph Perk's hair also caught fire at some ribbon-cutting ceremony. This was when Lake Erie was so polluted that people talked about walking across it to Canada, when Mayor Dennis Kucinich had to wear a wee bulletproof vest to throw out the first pitch at an Indians game because of death threats, when Cleveland became the first city since the Depression to default on loans. The efforts to save Cleveland then were earnest and touchingly misguided. I remember when the city's image makers decided on a new slogan: "New York's the Big Apple, but Cleveland's a plum." Tourism, as far as I know, did not skyrocket. Most people referred to Cleveland as they always had: the Mistake by the Lake.
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